Church to rededicate African American cemetery

A historic African American cemetery established for enslaved parishioners of St. Michael Lutheran Church will host a Nov. 1 rededication ceremony following nearly a decade of work to restore and preserve the burial ground.

“We want to make sure that 100 years from now, people know the story of this cemetery, the people who are buried here, the history of our racial relationships,” said Pastor Frank Anderson. “It’s an obligation I feel as a Christian, as a pastor and as somebody whose family was involved in the issue viscerally that this be preserved.”

St. Michael is inviting descendants of the 160-some people buried in the quarter-acre cemetery to attend the rededication, along with the nearby Pleasant Spring AME Church  congregation and community members with family ties to the land. The service is scheduled for 2 p.m. Nov. 1 at the cemetery on Windward Point Road and Arwen Lane outside Columbia in the northeastern corner of Lexington County.

After the rededication, St. Michael will hold a 3 p.m. organ recital in its sanctuary at 400 River Road, Columbia, featuring the church’s refurbished Elias and George Greenleaf Hook Organ originally built in 1865. A reception following both events is planned in the church fellowship hall.

The Nov. 1 ceremony follows nearly a decade of work clearing overgrown vegetation, cleaning and repairing weathered headstones and researching the cemetery’s history. St. Michael began the work in 2017 after Anderson’s daughter encountered the burial ground while running in the area.

“She came home and she said, ‘Dad, do you know anything about an old cemetery over there on Windward Point Road?’ Anderson recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, I know there's a Black cemetery there, but I really don't know a whole lot about it. And that just got me thinking about it, and so I came over here a couple days later.”

Digging through dense underbrush, Anderson found a headstone for July Spence, who was born enslaved and was a founding elder of nearby Pleasant Spring AME Church established in 1869.

“The hair on the back of my head just stood up because, you know, this actual person that I had been researching ends up being right there on a headstone,” Anderson said. “That started this curiosity about the connection between July Spence, Pleasant Spring and St. Michael. We also are one of the only congregations in South Carolina that has a record of African American members from 1842.”

The St. Michael African American Cemetery traces its roots to 1814, when it was used as a burial ground for the Lutheran congregation’s enslaved members.

“From the beginning, St. Michael included enslaved persons in worship, accessing the balcony of the Blue Church (1814-80) through a separate door for their use,” a historical marker for the cemetery explains. “In 1842, the congregation listed 27 men and 31 women on (its) ‘Roll of Coloured Members,’ all of them enslaved.”

“This is something I don't like to emphasize too much because it's kind of an ugly part of the story,” Anderson said. “We know that in 1842, there were about 80 African American members of St. Michael. They worshiped in the balcony of the building. So then, we also know that they were still members after emancipation until 1876 because the white congregation actually expels the Blacks from the congregation in 1876 when the federal troops leave.”

Anderson said restoring the cemetery has been a vital part of St. Michael’s racial reconciliation efforts.

“I'm also a descendant of slaveholders myself. So is my wife. And we can't change history. We can't change our genealogy, basically,” he said, adding that it’s important “that we honor this sacred space and that we make a place for it.”

“So many African American cemeteries have been bulldozed,” Anderson said. “…The  African American community has had its struggles, and I think it's important to all of us that we respect our history, but that we transcend our history and become better individuals and better people than we would be otherwise.”

The St. Michael congregation has partnered with Pleasant Spring AME Church to hold workdays at the historic cemetery, clearing brush and cleaning the headstones, footstones and fieldstones placed there in memory of roughly 160 people.

“It looks random when you're here, but if you start to piece it together, you notice that all these rocks are in rows, and so there is a very, very specific layout of the cemetery based on Christian principles of burying east to west,” Anderson explained. “Basically, you have the feet in the east and the head in the west so that at the resurrection, when you stand up, you're facing the rising sun.”

In 2022, St. Michael received a $40,000 earmark in South Carolina’s state budget to survey the cemetery with ground-penetrating radar and LIDAR, repair damaged headstones and erect a fence encircling the burial ground. The congregation has raised more than $15,000 to supplement the project.

“St. Michael has committed itself to making sure that this property is cared for, but we also want to remember that we're not trying to turn it into Disneyland,” Anderson said. “You know, it is what it is, and we want to make sure that people know it's cared about, but we don't want to sanitize it.

“We've had several people who've said, ‘Hey, let's bring in a load of dirt and fill in these depressions.’ And I'm like, ‘Well, you know, those depressions are actually people. So we want to honor the cemetery's function. We want to honor the people that are buried here, and we just want to move carefully and not disturb things too much.”

Several headstones broken into two or three pieces are now held together with metal braces. Rough-hewn stones likely placed by families to mark loved ones’ gravesites were left where they stood.

“We had certain rules that we had to follow. One of them is that we don't move anything, even a rock, because you don't have any idea kind of why it's there,” Anderson said. “Another tradition in the African American community is leaving mementos on gravesides. We don't have a lot of it here, but we we just did not want to disturb anything that might have been significant for a descendant who came here.”

Restoration work will continue in earnest through late October in advance of the Nov. 1 rededication ceremony.

“I still have a couple of these leaning headstones that will be straightened up before Nov. 1,” Anderson said. “We've got a couple that are knocked off their bases, which I will glue those back with epoxy. It won't look like it's a new cemetery, but we will have everything straightened. All of those markers there have already been reset.”

For Anderson and his parishioners at St. Michael, restoring the cemetery has served as a concrete reminder that human dignity and the Christian faith transcend racial barriers.

“It’s just a passion to love, care for and respect everybody, regardless of that shell that we inhabit as human beings,” the pastor said. “You know, there is really no such thing as race. You know, biologically, there's no difference between me and anybody else in the world.”